1. Field
One or more embodiments herein relate to electronic messaging.
2. Background
Remarkable technology development is making a cellular phone and a PCS phone much smaller, lighter and cheaper, so that a mobile phone is being popularized widely and rapidly. In these days, various mobile information terminals other than the popularized mobile phone are being introduced too. Among those mobile information terminals, a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) stands in the spotlight of consumers.
Some PDAs equip with a CDMA wireless modem which can communicate signals with a CDMA mobile communication network, thus, a person carrying such a PDA is able to use a mobile communication network or to communicate data through a mobile communication network anytime and anywhere. In other words, a user with such a PDA can use not only Short Message Service (SMS) of a mobile communication network but also data communication such as e-mail transmitting/receiving through traffic channels allocated in air link of a mobile communication network.
However, the SMS of a mobile communication network and the e-mail service of a data network are totally different each other in protocol. Namely, the SMS uses a protocol specified by a mobile communication network whereas the e-mail service uses Post Office Protocol (POP)/Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) agreed with a data server. Because the SMS and the e-mail service are conducted according to the mutually different protocols, the PDA has in general two built-in message management (editing, displaying, transmitting, etc.) application programs, one for message to be received/transmitted through SMS which is called ‘SMS message’ hereinafter, and the other for message to be received/transmitted through e-mail service which is called ‘mail message’ hereinafter. Thus, two separate DBs are prepared for SMS messages and mail ones respectively.
However, users do not know well the fact that the SMS message and the mail message exist separately due to such technical differences. Instead, they feel only inconvenience of message management because there are two separate methods which conduct same function, namely, message delivery. For example, when a user completes a SMS message, it can not be transmitted if it is against SMS protocol, e.g., if an e-mail address is entered as a recipient's address. In this case, a mail management application program should be executed newly. Then, because the application program to send a message is changed, the previously entered message is not preserved. Therefore, a user should re-write the same message or copy and paste the previous message into the mail management application program. This procedure to correct protocol mismatched inputs is somewhat boring to a user.
Moreover, a user also feels boring in message storing and searching work because of two separate methods of same function. Namely, if a user can not remember exactly whether a message he or she wrote is a SMS or a mail one, same message searching operations would be conducted individually with the two message-related applications.